"Afterwards, in dunging behind a bush, I found a March-cat, and with it I wiped my breech, but her claws were so sharp that they scratched and exulcerated all my perinee…"

Here’s an idea; let’s ignore the only candidate who actually communicates ideas that might benefit AmeriKKKa, and select instead the candidates that are the very embodiment of everything that’s wrong with AmeriKKKa. Business as usual baby!

A couple of questions;

Why do Americans hate so much?

Why are they incapable of caring for the poor, the sick, and the homeless?

Why do they, as a people, enjoy murdering the defenseless?

Why do they take pleasure in harassing the powerless?

Why are they all overwhelmed with the bloodlust?

Why are they all either economists, or sociopaths, or pornographers to a man, woman and child?

Why are they given to bullying?

Why are they all inhuman monsters?

I know your average joe is quite rough around the edges, but America is an insanely hilarious aggregation of imbecilic protoplasm. Now if only I could find the off switch…

Rudy Giuliani’s hopes of becoming the next US president effectively ended tonight after exit polls showed him coming well behind rivals John McCain and Mitt Romney in the all-important Florida primary.

Good job he didn’t invest a lot of money and energy there;

No less anxious was the former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who was likely to face calls to withdraw altogether if he placed poorly in the state into which he has poured almost all his energy and money in the hope of using it as a springboard for his presidential quest.

So that’s it then. The rather rotund diva has begun her musical performance. Your campaign is finally over. It’s time to take off the make-up and put that wig back in the cupboard. I’ll miss the drag, but not the nineeleventerrorists911septembertheeleventh. Bye-bye Rudolph, and thanks for all the fun memories. But it’s not all bad, of course, because now you get to concentrate on your first love (i.e. musical theatre).

Less than a month after President Bush signed legislation overhauling the Freedom of Information Act, the measure’s main Senate backers are accusing the White House of planning to scuttle a special FOIA office in violation of the law.

An aide to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said Office of Management and Budget officials have told committee staff that they plan in the president’s FY09 budget to park within the Justice Department all the funding authorized by the new law for a Government Information Services Office within the National Archives and Records Administration.

The office would include an ombudsman to oversee FOIA disputes across government. It is intended to push agencies to comply with the law, address FOIA backlogs and speed up resolution of FOIA requests. The office has not received any appropriations and its budget has not been set.

But by shifting the funding to the Justice Department, OMB would effectively eliminate the office, because it appears no similar operation would be created there, Leahy’s aide said. Instead, the funds apparently would go to the department’s Information Policy Office, which now oversees government FOIA compliance.

The recently enacted FOIA bill, sponsored in the Senate by Leahy and Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, deliberately located the new office outside of Justice.

National Archives officials are relatively independent of political pressure, the staffer explained, “but DOJ is different.” Government transparency advocates consider the department hostile to efforts to improve FOIA responsiveness, in part because it represents agencies sued by FOIA requesters.

In a floor speech Wednesday, Leahy called the White House’s prospective plans illegal. “Such a move is not only contrary to the express intent of the Congress, but it is also contrary to the very purpose of this legislation, to ensure the timely and fair resolution of Americans’ FOIA requests,” he said. Though creation of the office is one of a series of steps mandated by the legislation, Leahy indicated it is a key component of the bill.

Cornyn has taken the same position. “He does agree with Senator Leahy and would oppose that effort,” a Cornyn spokesman said.

An OMB spokesman said yesterday he could not comment on whether the administration has the authority to move the money to Justice, because doing so would require speculating about the budget before its Feb. 4 unveiling. “This will be answered when the budget is released,” he said.

Patrice McDermott, director of OpenTheGovernment.org, an umbrella group for organizations advocating increased federal transparency, said the White House may say shifting the money to Justice is just a preliminary step before the office in the National Archives is set up. But even initially “putting it in DOJ would essentially obviate what Leahy and Cornyn did with the legislation,” McDermott said.

Bush signed the bill on New Year’s Eve, and its passage went relatively unnoticed at a time when the media was focused squarely on the first presidential primary contests. See reports from CongressDaily, AP and The Swamp for background on the legislation.

It’s the logic of rendition; in the Government Information Services Office current location we have little control over FOIA requests, so in order to take control we move it to a location more conducive to our intentions (some underground prison in Egypt for example… or better yet, the DOJ).

Representative Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio may get excluded from Democratic presidential debates, as he has been recently, but no one can deny him the floor in the House.

And today Mr. Kucinich took to the floor to fire off his latest salvo at the Bush administration: his plans to introduce Articles of Impeachment against President Bush on Jan. 28 — the day of Mr. Bush’s State of the Union speech.

Accusing the administration of lying about the need for the war in Iraq, Mr. Kucinich said he did not need to hear the president’s assessment. “We know the State of the Union,” he declared. “It’s a lie.”

He also fired a volley at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California who has maintained that impeaching Mr. Bush is not on the table for Congressional Democrats. “If impeachment is off the table,” Mr. Kucinich said, “truth is off the table. If truth is off the table then this body is living a lie.”

Mr. Kucinich introduced Articles of Impeachment against Vice President Dick Cheney last April and in November, with the surprise help of Republicans seeking to embarrass the Democrats, he nearly succeeded in securing an hour of debate on the House floor. House Democratic leaders blocked that, however, by referring the impeachment effort back to the Judiciary Committee.

Anti-Bush groups have been urging Mr. Kucinich to undertake an effort to impeach the president.

Get a move on you clowns! Within a year they’ll have all escaped to SouthAmerica, with Hitler and various graduates of the School of the Americas, and it’ll be too late. All the same, kudos to Kucinich.

A mother whose two teenage daughters were placed in an orphanage when she fell ill during a post-Christmas shopping trip to New York has been told she is under investigation because her children were taken into care.

Yvonne Bray, took her daughters Gemma, 15, and Katie, 13, to New York shortly after Christmas for a shopping trip but was taken into hospital when she fell ill with pneumonia during their visit.

The girls were then told they could not wait at the hospital and as minors would have to be taken into care.

Social workers took them to a municipal orphanage in downtown Manhattan, where they were separated, strip-searched and questioned before being kept under lock and key for the next 30 hours.

The two sisters were made to shower in front of security staff and told to fill out a two-page form with questions including: “Have you ever been the victim of rape?” and “Do you have homicidal tendencies?”

One question asked “are you in a street gang?” to which Gemma replied: “I’m a member of Appledore library.”

Their clothes, money and belongings were taken and they were issued with regulation white T-shirt and jeans. Katie said: “It was like being in a little cage. I tried to go to sleep, but every time I opened my eyes, someone was looking right at me.”

Eventually Bray discharged herself, and – still dressed in hospital pyjamas – tracked down the girls.

She said: “It is absolutely horrendous that two young girls were put through an ordeal like that. They were made to answer traumatic questions about things they don’t really understand and spend over 24 hours under surveillance.”

Since returning home, Bray has received a letter from the US Administration for Children and Families, notifying her that, because the children were admitted to the orphanage, she is now “under investigation.”

This is just too insane. While reading the above I was immediately put in mind of the film Brazil (another dystopian vision of the present, or near future).

America scares the shit out of me (these days I can’t say the name without shivering).

This is about how I spend 24 concentrated hours spread out over 4 days during Holidays to build the online service Wigitize.com. It is part of my ongoing learning process on how to run a successful web startup.